Arctic Ice Growing Again; Computer Climate Simulations Just Crashed

Mid-September we can see the long-predicted collapse of Arctic ice is postponed for yet another year. Arctic ice is presently 472.000 km^2 more than in 2007, and 1.2 million km^2 more than the record-setting 2012. —Ron Clutz, Science Matters, 1 September 2018

The latest observations show that Arctic sea ice is on course to have a greater minimum extent than in 2015 and 2016, and is running higher than levels seen a decade ago. Back then, the BBC reported that Arctic summers may be ice-free by 2013, although this estimate was described as being ‘too conservative’. Climate science has to be more deeply grounded in real-world observations rather than models that are inevitably riddled with flawed human assumptions. –Harry Wilkinson, The Conservative Woman, 7 September 2018

Ross McKitrick and John Christy have an important new paper out in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. This is the latest fusillade in the long battle over whether the climate simulations that lie behind demands for decarbonization and other political action actually amount to nothing but a hill of beans (as they say on the other side of the pond). —Andrew Montford, GWPF, 18 September 2018

Comparing modeled to observed trends over the past 60 years…shows that all models warm more rapidly than observations and in the majority of individual cases the discrepancy is statistically significant. We argue that this provides informative evidence against the major hypothesis in most current climate models. — Ross McKitrick and John Christy, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, 2018

For roughly the last two years, the media has been warning us that climate change is threatening the world’s supply of coffee beans. According to the hypothesis, growing conditions for coffee will no longer be suitable in many places, and plagues and pestilences will destroy the crops. Thankfully, these are all testable hypotheses. The world has been getting warmer over at least the past few decades, so coffee production should be decreasing, and coffee prices should be going up. Are they? Nope. —Alex Berezow, American Council of Science and Health, 17 September 2018